Assembly documentation for contract manufacturers
As a contract manufacturer, you build products for customers who supply their own engineering data. Excel bills of materials, PDF drawings, and occasionally verbal instructions: you have to figure out what has changed and what that means for your assembly procedure.
Limited control over input
"We receive an Excel bill of materials, and are left to figure out the changes ourselves"
Assembly documentation for contract manufacturers always starts with a problem: the input is wrong. The customer sends a bills of materials in Excel, maybe a 2D drawing, and sometimes they don't have the complete picture themselves. You have to figure out which parts are new compared to the previous version, what the impact is on the assembly sequence, and whether the cost price still holds. That takes hours, and sooner or later something goes wrong. A component that was overlooked, a change that didn't come through, a margin that disappears due to an unexpected part.
Baseboard imports your customer's bills of materials and automatically compares it to the previous version. Which parts have been added, changed, or removed — immediately clear, per assembly step. The impact on your work instructions and cost price is directly visible. This gives you the overview for a new job or revision within minutes that you would otherwise have to manually distill from Excel. The link with BOM management ensures that changes flow through directly to the corresponding work instructions.
Per customer, you build a knowledge archive in Baseboard: which products have you made, what did the bills of materials look like, what assembly knowledge have you built up? For a new job or variant, you use that foundation as a starting point. This speeds up the quoting phase and ensures more consistent quality, even when new employees are working on the product.
